"American Psyche"

Thomas Frank, New York Times

Reviewing:

The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America.

By John Sperling, Suzanne Helburn,
Samuel George, John Morris and Carl Hunt. Illustrated.

272 pp. PoliPoint Press. $39.95.

The Uncivil War: How a New Elite Is Destroying Our
Democracy.
By David Lebedoff.
191 pp. Taylor Trade
Publishing. $24.95.

Who We Are Now: The Changing Face of America in the
Twenty-First Century. By Sam Roberts.
293 pp. Times
Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $27.50.

Myths of Free Trade: Why American Trade Policy Has
Failed. By Sherrod Brown.
228 pp. The New Press.
$24.95.

That we are a nation divided is an almost universal
lament of this bitter election year. However, the exact
property that divides us — elemental though it is said
to be — remains a matter of some controversy. One
thing is certain in the search to unravel the mystery
of the ''great divide'': we know for sure the answer
isn't class. We can rule that uncomfortable subject out
from the start.

"Chapter 39, Order 30:
Torture and Neo-Liberalism with Sycorax in Iraq"
Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch

Reviewing:
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
By Silvia Federici
Autonomedia 2004

The new U.S. Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, disregarded torture in his infamous, post 9/11 memorandum to Bush: "In my judgment, this new paradigm [the 'war on terrorism'] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

"Quaint," eh?

It might more aptly be applied to Magna Carta, the epitome of quaintness, though Professor Huntington of Harvard tells us in his screed to rid the nation of Hispanic cultural influence that the American creed, its cultural core, is Anglo, "going back to Magna Carta," which he thinks is somehow Protestant (Magna Carta 1215, Protestant Reformation 1517)! Furthermore, although it is such a quaint part of the Anglo core, it is not even written in English. Its most powerful part is chapter 39:

Nullus liber homo capiatur vel imprisonetur aut disseisietur de libero tenemento suo, vel libertatibus, vel liberis consuetudinibus suis, aut utlagetur, aut exuletur, aut aliquo modo destruatur, nec super eum ibimus, nec super eum mittemus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorum, vel per legem terræ.

Edward Coke provides the classic translation.

"Labour History as the History of Multitudes"

Marcel van der Linden, Multitudes

Reviewing:
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker,
The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
(Boston: Beacon Press 2000)

Labour hisorians study the working class to examine its development, composition, working conditions, lifestyle, culture, and many other aspects. But what exactly do we mean when we use the term "working class" ? Over the past half-century, the answer to this seemingly simple question has changed continuously.

In the 1950s and 1960s it usually denoted male breadwinners who earned a living in agriculture, industry, mining, or transport. In the 1970s and 1980s objections from feminists instigated a fundamental revision that broadened the focus beyond the male head of the household to include the wife and children. Occupational groups that tended to be overlooked in the past, such as domestic servants and prostitutes, started to receive serious consideration.

The chronological and geographic scope of the research expanded as well. Labour historians became interested in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and took a closer look at pre-industrial wage earners. Our overall perspective on the working class has undergone a paradigmatic revolution. The signs indicate that this first transition is merely a harbinger of a second one. 1

"After the Empire"

Scott McLemee, Chronicle of Higher Education

Reviewing:

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin).

In 2000, Michael Hardt, an associate professor of literature at Duke University, and Antonio Negri, a legendary figure on the Italian left, published a volume bearing the grand, stark title Empire. Even before it was listed in the Harvard University Press catalog, the appearance of the book was keenly anticipated among antiglobalization activists. Rumor had it that Empire would provide a definitive analysis of the new world order. It would be the theoretical bridge between postmodernist academics and a mass movement that was making it ever harder for international financial institutions to meet in peace.

The Cannibis Companion
by Steven Wishnia
Running Press, 2004

If you haven’t been pinched for herbal indiscretions of late, you could be forgiven for thinking weed became legal long ago. With grandmothers smoking herb to ease glaucoma and a president with a predilection for the harder stuff (cocaine as a youth, Jesus in recent years), marijuana has never been more pervasive, less taboo or higher quality. So while teenagers across Brooklyn are still tucking bags beneath their tender scrotums, Indypendent contributor Steven Wishnia’s The Cannibus Companion offers “the ultimate guide to connoisseurship” in a tasteful, and tasty coffee-table book artfully designed to amuse your stoned-out brethren while they’re glued to the couch.

And, it’s educational too. Learn how racial paranoia fed into early prohibition efforts. Marvel bud porn so explicit the pages stick together. Ponder the difference between indica and sativa. Geek out over the technology of hydroponics. Enrich yourself with regional rolling techniques such as blunts and the exotic “European” spliff – mixed with tobacco to make it truly rebellious. And weep, weep I tell you, at the palty skinny on the “New York joint,” famous around the country for being so slim you can “pick your teeth.”

Which reminds me, something needs to be done about the crazy price of the smokables in this city. Reading chapters on how they roll “Texas-sized” down south, I can’t remember the last time I even saw a dime-bag. An eighth of hydro reportedly runs $70-$80. Community merchants blame the “war on terror,” with cops randomly searching at bridges and tunnels for Osama Bin Smokin, but I smell profiteering. If you can’t get lifted on a working man’s wage, then the terrorists are winning. And we wouldn’t want that.

Setting the Standard for the Study of the Russian
Revolution

Kevin J. Murphy

Reviewing Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power

Chicago: Haymarket Books, London: Pluto Press, 2004.

xxxiii + 394 pp. Photographs, maps, notes, selected
bibliography, index. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-745-32269-7; $18.00 (paper), ISBN 0-745-32268-9.

Contemporary politics always have figured prominently
in framing the way historians approach the Russian
Revolution. The social movements of the 1960s inspired
a generation of historians to study history "from
below," in which they attempted to reconstruct the
actions and aspirations of those previously written out
of history. In no area did this new social history
produce a more thorough revision than in the contested
field of Russian studies. Over a course of a decade, a
small but extremely talented group of historians proved
beyond doubt what many on the Left had long argued —
that a massive popular uprising had ushered in the
transfer of power to the soviets in 1917.

"Once Upon a Time…"

Jacques Depelchin

Reviewing Ayi Kwei Armah's
KMT: In the House of Life, An Epistemic Novel

[Jacques Depelchin, PhD, is
Executive Director of the Ota Benga International Alliance for Peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley]

The twenty four chapters of this novel are divided into three unequal parts. Part one (the scholars) starts with the narrator (Lindela) confessing to the contradiction she had lived through: on the one hand trying to run away from her mission in order to achieve peace of mind, and on the other hand, so to speak, the mission constantly presenting itself and calling on her to act. What had caused her to seek forgetfulness was the loss of her best friend while attending a school (White castle school) set up by well-meaning white colonizers to train future native leaders. Her dilemma is a familiar one: a witness of a crime who cannot help but respond to her conscience and speak the truth, whatever the cost.

Jungle Fever

Marshall Sahlins, Washington Post Book World
[Dec. 10, 2000]

Reviewing Darkness in El Dorado

How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon

By Patrick Tierney

Norton. 417 pp. $27.95

Guilty not as charged.

Well before it reached the bookstores, Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado set off a flurry of publicity and electronic debate over its allegations that, at about the same time American soldiers were carrying out search-and-destroy missions in the jungles of Vietnam, American scientists were doing something like research-and-destroy by knowingly spreading disease in the jungles of Amazonia. On closer examination, the alleged scientific horror turned out to be something less than that, even as it was always the lesser part of Tierney's book. By far the greater part is the story, sufficiently notorious in its own right, of the well-known anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon: of his work among the Yanomami people of Venezuela and his fame among the science tribe of America.

A Hacker Manifesto

McKenzie Wark

Ours is once again an age of manifestos. Wark's book
challenges the new regime of property relations with all
the epigrammatic vitality, conceptual innovation, and
revolutionary enthusiasm of the great manifestos. — Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire

Type hello to the nascent "hacker class," McKenzie Wark's loose
confederation of fixers, file sharers, inventors, shut-ins,
philosophers, programmers, and pirates... The Lang College
professor's ambitious A Hacker Manifesto Googles for signs of
hope in this cyber-global-corporate-brute world of ours, and he
fixes on the hackers, macro-savvy visionaries from all fields who
"hack" the relationships and meanings the rest of us take for
granted. If we hackers-of words, computers, sound, science,
etc.-organize i
nto a working, sociopolitical class, Wark argues,
then the world can be ours. — Hua Hsu, Village Voice

A double is haunting the world — the double of
abstraction, the virtual reality of information,
programming or poetry, math or music, curves or
colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies,
companies and communities now depend. The bold aim
of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose,
and interests of the emerging class responsible for
making this new world — for producing the new
concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of
the stuff of raw data.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Toward an American Revolutionary Praxis"

Geert Dhondt, The New Formulation

Reviewing: How the Irish Became
White

By Noel Ignatiev

New York: Routledge, 1995

Race Traitor

By Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey (editors)

New York: Routledge, 1996

 

The Lesson of The Hour: Wendell
Phillips

on Abolition and Strategy

By Noel Ignatiev (editor)

Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2001.

[O]f all struggles in which a popular
victory would fatally weaken U.S. Capitalism, the fight against White Supremacy
is the one with the greatest chance of success. — Noel Ignatiev(1)

One hundred years ago, W.E.B. Dubois wrote in The
Souls of Black Folk that “The problem of the twentieth century is
the problem of the color line.” How has this analysis from one of this
nation’s greatest revolutionary intellectuals influenced American anarchism?
Not much, I guess. Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, for example, did not
write much on the “Negro Question,” nor did many of their contemporaries
in the heyday of the anarchist movement. While the Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW) were a welcome exception to this phenomenon, most of the revolutionary
proletariat did not pay much attention to the color line. The famous Eugene
V. Debs even stated that revolutionary politics was “white men’s
business.” In the late 19th century and early 20th century, much of the
revolutionary proletariat—in which the anarchist movement was based—was
from Europe or of European decent and their outlook and experiences reflected
these origins. The European immigrants brought with them anarchism and other
revolutionary traditions from Europe, but—of course—this here is
not Europe; the United States, while part of this global capitalist system,
has its own peculiar development, with its own fault lines and its own revolutionary
heritage, and U.S. anarchists are frequently much less familiar with it than
with the European revolutionary tradition. Anarchists in the United States tend
to know more about Russia’s Makhnovist movement or the details of the
Spanish Civil War than about—for example—the Abolitionist Movement,
the Reconstruction era, or the Civil Rights Movement. The New Abolitionists,
with their Journal Race Traitor, are a refreshing exception to this.
They are looking not to the European revolutionary legacy to imagine the possibility
of social revolution in this country, but instead look at America’s own
revolutionary tradition, to people such as the Abolitionists and the Wobblies,
to try figure out a strategy for revolution in the belly of the beast.

New Abolitionist politics have had an increasing
influence on the anarchists in the United States. The politics were present
in the now defunct Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation,(2) they
have influenced the new revolutionary group that is forming around the Bring
the Ruckus Draft Proposal(3) and they have had some influence in the Northeastern
Federation of Anarcho-Communists. This book review will look at three books
by New Abolitionist Noel Ignatiev.